SOURCE: "Poetic Ideal and Fictional Reality in the Izumi Shikibu nikki," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1, 1977, pp. 135-82.

[In the following excerpt, Walker analyzes the structure of the Izumi Shikibu Diary, emphasizing its two competing modes of presentation—idealism and realism.]

The Izuin Shikibu nikki (Izumi Shikibu Diary, 1008?), one of the masterpieces of Heian prose literature, is a fictional narrative or fictionalized memoir which depicts a love affair between the famous Heian poetess Izumi Shikibu and a certain Prince Atsumichi. In its close observation of the fluctuations of the individual will of the characters, the Diary shares the realistic preoccupations of much Heian fiction. The conflict in temperament between these two real and fictionally plausiblepeople, a conflict which is finally resolved in harmony, provides the dramatic tension and the "plot" of the work. But the Diary can also be seen as a work in the romance mode whose function is primarily to celebrate the Heian courtly rituals and ideals of poetry and love.¹ Then the famous Izumi Shikibu becomes the high priestess of the cult of poetry; the poetess and the Prince are transformed into ideal lovers, their actions and poems into ideal manifestations of Heian courtly sensibility and grace. And the ritualized poetic exchanges of the lovers, which play an important structural role in the Diary, perform the function of constantly renewing the existence of Heian courtly life and immortalizing the mythology of love which underlies its greatest literary creations.

The coexistence of what can be called an idealistic (romance) and a realistic (novelistic) mode of presentation in the Diary creates a tension in its very structure. The conflict between the two modes can be said to stem from the author's own ambivalent attitude toward her material. In part, the author adhered to what I will discuss more fully later as the poetic view of a love affair—an idealized view of love influenced by the poetic anthology—in which ritualized and stylized poetic exchanges play an important role. Finally, however, the demands of a realistic narrative or, to put it a bit differently, the author's sense of loyalty to the facts of the affair as she knew them, forced her to depart radically from the traditional poetic view of a love affair. The aim of this essay is to explore the tension in the Izumi Shikibu Diary which results from its dual aim of celebrating the poetic ideal and depicting reality. Through my discussion of the Diary in relation to the traditional poetic anthology I hope to contribute a new interpretation of the work—one which, instead of emphasizing the Diary's reflection of the real life of Izumi Shikibu, takes into account its influence by a poetic structuring of experience. At the same time I want to speculate on the implications of the poetic ideal of love and life for Heian fictional works in general. The controversial ending of the Diary will provide a particularly fruitful opportunity for such speculation. I should make clear from the outset that for my purposes, which are to discuss formal and structural elements of the work, the answer to the much argued question of who wrote the Diary is irrelevant.² I consider the author of the Diary, whether or not it is the poetess herself, as a person conscious of courtly doctrine and behavior and versed in courtly literary forms, as a writer consciously shaping her narrative according to traditional models, and above all, as a whether writer of imaginative literature. Thus, when I speak of the author's intent, I am referring to a manner of treatment of the subject matter which is deducible from the conflicting patterns of the Diary itself.

The Stylized Poetic View of a Love Affair

By the time the author wrote the Izumi Shikibu Diary there existed a standard way of viewing the development of a love affair. This codified way of seeing love had originated in lyric poetry in the tanka or waka form, and had gained increasing authority over the centuries through its presence in the love books of the poetic anthologies (chokusenshu)—poetry collections commissioned by the emperor which were designed to preserve and spread the courtly ideals of life. The Heian way of seeing love, like its counterpart the Ovidian ideology of love (as found in the medieval Western romance), tended to be stylized in its expression, conservative and subtly normative in its values.³ It is reasonable to assume that the author of the Izumi Shikibu Diary was influenced by the standard depiction of a love affair as found in the courtly anthologies, for any writer of the Heian period would have had a thorough knowledge of the poetic tradition—a knowledge good enough to enable him to cap a verse recited to him or to compose his own allusive variation on a particular classicalpoem.⁴ In fact, if the author of the Diary was a woman, as I am assuming she was, the knowledge of the poetic tradition was the chief kind of knowledge available to her. The awareness of a certain corpus of traditional poetry, with its assumptions about human nature and action, doubtless not only heightened the author's own feelings about her material but also helped shape her interpretation of it in the Diary. In order to show how the poetic tradition viewed the development of a love affair I will analyze the stages of love as presented in the five books of love poems of the Kokinshu, one of the two most important poetry anthologies in the anthology tradition.⁵ Compiled in 905, this anthology was the first to depict a love affair in terms of moments of love experience linked chronologically and dramatically. Seen against the background of the modern reader's own experience of love, the Kokinshu pattern of the development of love will appear stylized and rigid—a parody of a real-life love affair. But it is just this stylized, artificial pattern of the development of love that was the author's matière, and she owed it a certain loyalty as a writer of her time.

The five books of love poems in the Kokinshu present the canon of courtly sentiment on the various stages of love which, taken as a whole, provides an ideology of love that assumes that love will grow, flourish for a brief time, and then inevitably decline.⁶ The eighty-two poems in Book XI, the first of the five books, revolve around the broad theme of the beginning of love.⁷ Several poems treat the theme (dai or topos) of love arising after the lover's first glimpse of the woman: in No. 476, the famous poet-lover of the ninth century, Ariwara no Narihira, yearns for a woman he has only glimpsed briefly; in No. 479, a man compares a woman he saw briefly to cherry blossoms obscured by the mist. A third poem, No. 481, varies the sense by which the lover perceives the woman—merely hearing her voice has made the lover a slave of love. Some poems are direct expressions of suffering in love which make use of typical natural images or place names. Others, such as the following poem, delight in the self-analysis and questioning of states of mind that were staples of Heian love poetry:

My heart seems to dwell no longer in my
 body
But rather with the one I love—
In that case, how can I even know
That I have become entangled in love?
Kokinshu 523

Here, in a witty conceit, the lover remarks on the loss of consciousness of self which he suffers due to love. How, he asks, can he have feelings of love, when the seat of his perceptions, and his sense of self, have fled to the loved one?

If the poems in Book XI tocused on the lover's first view of the loved one and the first feelings of love, the poems of Book XII delineate a stage in the development of love in which greater suffering, but also greater happiness, are involved. As love crystallizes around the loved one, to use a Stendhalian metaphor, moments of high intensity in love begin to occur. It is not surprising, then, that at this point in the love affair the typical courtly images associated with the height of love appear. The most important of these is dream (yume),⁸ and the opening poem in this book, by the famous ninth-century poetess Ono no Komachi, is on this topic:

Probably out of longing for him
I fell asleep and dreamed of him—
Had I known it was a dream
I would never have awakened.
Kokinshu 552

In all, nine poems on the dai of dream are found in the sixty-three poems of Book XII; they are scattered, a few at a time, at the beginning, middle, and end of the book. Dreams had a special meaning in Heian times. When the Heian poet spoke of a dream he often meant a dream in which he saw his loved one. Since dreams were seen as miraculous, divine responses to one's desires, the appearance of the loved one in a dream was interpreted as an answer to one's longing and, further, as an indication that one's desire for a meeting in real life was about to be fulfilled.⁹ The theme of a dream in which the lover sees the beloved can be seen as a continuation of the theme of longing to see the loved one which was one of the typical themes of Book XI, only here the longing is so powerful that it brings about a meeting, in a dream state at least. The above poem of Komachi states very strongly the ideal of Heian courtly love: never to awaken from the momentary, dreamlike state of love which, even if it is experienced only in a dream, is still more intense, and therefore more valuable than any moment of everyday reality. Yet even in Komachi's poem there is an element of unpleasantness, for the experience of love on the plane of everyday reality is absent. The poem by Komachi, and others on the same topic, express a paradoxical awareness that is at the heart of the Heian ideology of love: man cherishes the ideal of perfect, dreamlike love, but is unable to bring it about or control its growth. Thus, the experience of love is inevitably linked with suffering.

Buddhism provided the Heian courtier with a means of understanding and sometimes of formulating the paradox of human love. It saw suffering as a natural outcome of man's attempt to hold onto something that was by its very nature transitory. It advised that in order to avoid suffering man should try to achieve an attitude of detachment from sense pleasures, of which the most tempting and the most destructive was love. The words "darkness of the heart" (kokoro no yami) and "to be entangled in conflicting feelings due to love" (madou)—words that occur often in the Kokinshu poems—describe love as a state of being in which the individual is enmeshed helplessly in sense pleasures. From a Buddhist viewpoint, then, love is an aberration from the true path of human conduct, regardless of how much momentary and dreamlike pleasure it may give. Shinto looks down on love also, as in the following poem from Book XI:

I purified myself in the river
That I might not love,
But it seems the gods
Have not accepted my purification ritual.
Kokinshu 501

Here love is seen as a pollution which needs a particular religious ritual to remove it. The lover has been unable, though he tried nobly, to rid himself of the polluting power of love, and in this, as well as in his sufferings from love, he recalls the Ovidian lover who fails to cure himself ofthe sickness of love.¹⁰ The courtly lover who suffers from love—in poetry, at least—does not succeed in warding off its pangs. In the Kokinshu, as in the medieval European romances of Chrétien, love is seen as a force which the lover's morality or rationality is unable to combat. No wonder, then, that such poems present the lover as yielding to the pleasures of love, no matter how much suffering accompanies it.

The compilers of the Kokinshu seem to have structured the development of love in the poems of Book XII in accordance with the courtly idea of love as at the same time joyous dream and sadly ephemeral reality, for soon after the two poems on the dream of love which open the book, they inserted two poems (Nos. 556 and 557) which use the image of sleeves wet with tears. Furthermore, poems containing the latter image are found in the same number and regularity of distribution as those containing the word "dream," as if the compilers wanted to balance each assertion of love's happiness with a warning of its imminent end.¹¹ The image of sleeves wet with tears is an extremely concrete, sensual image for disappointment in love. Sleeves on the Heian garment were long, silken, and multilayered. On an occasion when desire was to be satisfied, they were spread beneath the lovers as bedclothes; when love proved barren, they received the lover's tears. Poems on dreams, by contrast, are often optimistic—they present a world in which, ideally at least, only fulfillment, only perfect communion of the lover with the beloved occurs. But in the following poem the two images, dreams and sleeves wet with tears, are ominously combined:

Does dew fall
Even on the path of dreams?
I walked there all night
And my sleeves are soaked.
Kokinshu 574

Dew is a metaphor for tears. If it falls even on the "path" of dreams, something is awry in the perfect world of the lovers. In placing such foreboding poems as this one in between poems which express the ideal of dreamlike love, the Kokinshu compilers have indicated that the stylized affair they are "narrating" is bound to end in sadness. Indeed, one poem near the end of Book XII prophesies what is to come:

That which is more precious
To me even than life
Is to awaken from a dream
That is not yet finished.
Kokinshu 609

Here a person suffering from unrequited love dreams that he and his beloved are meeting. After waking from the dream he exclaims that nothing in the world is so dear to him as waking while still in the middle of his dream, i.e., while still experiencing the unexpected bliss of meeting his loved one.¹² The poem implies that while waking from an unfinished dream is pleasant, waking when the dream is finished would mean waking to the realization that the meeting with the loved one isover, and being thrust back into one's usual miserable state of unrequited love, where a meeting is never possible.

In the context of the development of the hypothetical Kokinshu love affair, then, the poem expresses the lover's fear that the love affair will end, for experiencing the end of the love affair would be like awakening to a reality devoid of love once the "dream" of love was over.

In Book XIII the dream of love continues. The desire expressed in the preceding poem to live an unfinished dream seems to have been fulfilled, for a regular love relationship has been established. Numerous signs of this can be found, for example, in poems with themes such as the successful tryst (such poems are sometimes accompanied by images which indicate repeated visits—the coming of dawn or the crowing of a cock), the unsuccessful tryst, the fear of gossip, and the anxiety over whether or not to reveal the affair. The following well-known poem by Narihira expresses, with elegance and sensitivity, a mood particular to this stage in the development of a love affair:

I am at one with spring—
Neither getting up nor sleeping
I pass the night, and spend the day
Gazing in reverie in the endless spring rains.
Kokinshu 616

The situation is the following: the poet has not visited a lady for some time and sends this poem as an excuse for his lack of attention. He is still in love with her, he suggests, but he has been made apathetic and listless by the mesmeric spring rains—so much so that he is unable to bring himself to visit her. The word nagaame (long spring rains) is a kakekotoba for nagame (gazing vacantly in reverie), so that the poet, who is "at one with spring," equates his state of mind with the sensuous, continuously falling rains. The poem expresses with subtlety the state of mind of a person at a stage in a love affair when desire has been fully satisfied long before. The image of the continuous rains expresses a satiety which, in effect, makes the lady superfluous, and here lies the wit which some critics find in the poem.¹³ In any case, the poem embodies the ideal sensitivity to the emotions and the lethargic and leisurely aristocratic awareness of the passing of time which are important qualities of the courtier in love. Finally, the poem speaks of long hours—both days and nights—spent in a continuous state of being in love, and thus it communicates a feeling of leisurely perfection.

The repetitive nature of the lover's visits at this stage of the affair is expressed most succinctly and in the most ritualized manner by an image which is found in the love poems and songs of many cultures: that of lovers parting at dawn. As in the European alba or Tagelied, the lovers express regret, impatience, and anger at the coming of the dawn which will separate them. The topos of lovers parting at dawn can be taken from its purely ritualistic context and made the vehicle of a more personal emotion, however, as in the following poems associated with the ideal lover Narihira. After a night of love, a woman writes to her lover:

I am unable to tell—
Did you come to me or did I go to you?
Did I see you in a dream
Or was it reality? Was I asleep or awake?
Kokinshu 645

To which Narihira replies:

I am lost in the
Utter darkness of the heart—

People of this world of appearances,
You decide whether it was dream or reality.
Kokinshu 646

These two poems convey the highest truth of Japanese courtly love—namely, that the experience of love is perceived by lovers as so perfect, so much more intense than everyday reality, that it causes them to question the very nature of reality. Placed in the center of Book XIII, as well as in the center of the five books of love poems, they provide the poetic tradition's most perfect expression of the state of love at its height. I noted earlier that Buddhism called love a darkness of the heart (kokoro no yami) in which man utterly loses his ability to discriminate (madou). Much as these words imply that passion is evil, their use in the second poem does not succeed in banishing the mood of happiness and dreamlike fulfillment called up by the poem itself. For the poem expresses a paradoxical truth about Japanese courtly love: though the courtiers submitted intellectually to Buddhist interpretations of love, emotionally they resisted them. The mood of happiness and wonder in the two poems is limited to a moment, perhaps only the moment in which they were written, but it defies all attempts at moral condemnation. Like dreams themselves, the dreamlike happiness of love seems to be divinely inspired.

The sixty-nine poems in Book XIV treat love in the stage when it is past perfect fulfillment. Whereas in the previous book the lovers were suspended in a state of wonderment over their love, or responding to the very real problem of other people finding out about it, here the lover is beginning to tire of the loved one. Some poems in this book speak of the desire to extend love into the future, the lovers swearing love for eternity, while others predict love's imminent end. In both kinds of poems, intellectualized concern or fear takes the lover out of the perfect and real present moment which is sufficient unto itself, and into an uncertain and unreal future. Also, several poems project the thoughts of the lover into the past, to a time when love flourished (as it does not now, at the present moment), for example, the following:

I will not forget
How my heart bloomed in love,
Deep in color
Like the first blossoms of the safflower.
Kokinshu 723

Here, for the first time, appears an image which will be important in the final book of poems: the fading flower. The season of autumn, typically used as an image of decline and transience, appears in several poems. The first note of bitterness over the failure of the love affair appears also:

Whoever invented the word
'Love'
Should have called it right out
'Death.'
Kokinshu 698

Love has finally revealed the cruelty hidden behind its facade of perfection; the perfect world of love at its height has been destroyed by the lovers' lies:

If this were a world
Without falsehood,
How pleased I would be
By your words.
Kokinshu 712

Book XV, the last book of love poems, begins with a poem in which a lover, again the famous Narihira, questions the reality of a love affair of the past:

The moon is not the moon of that year!
Spring is not the spring of that year!

I alone am the same as I was then.
Kokinshu 747

Here the poet is writing from a state of awareness that is paradoxical contradictory. He feels as though it is still the spring of last year—i.e., as though he is still existing in the perfection of the love affair of that spring—though he knows the affair has in fact been over for some time. Love seems to confer on him a state of freedom from change which contradicts his knowledge that, in fact, it is precisely man who changes from year to year, not nature. The poem, then, posits the existence of a timeless attitude of mind which is not the memory of a bitter past but the recovery of that past in a moment of identification with it. It provides the last intimation in the anthology of the courtly world of dreamlike, perfect love. After it comes a series of poems in which the lover alternately expresses regret, anger, and bitterness at the decline of the love affair. Poems dominate which use metaphors for the lover's abandonment of the loved one: the season of autumn, plants and insects fated to die in autumn, and the fading flower.

Perhaps the tradition's most famous poem on the decline of love is that by Komachi, which uses the image of the fading flower:

That which fades with its color unseen
Is the flower of the heart
Of a person dwelling in
This world of appearances.
Kokinshu 797

The impact of the poem depends on the triple meaning of the word iro: love, color, and face. The color of the flower reveals (shows on its face) that it is fading, but the love (flower) of a person in the world of appearances fades invisibly, inside his heart, and does not betray its fading to another person. That the flower of love will fade is inevitable, for love is seen as a natural growth—yet there is a particular treachery involved in the fading of the human, as opposed to the natural flower. This treachery stems from the fickle nature of man in this world. The poetess accepts the truth expressed in the poem, though with some anger and bitterness, for it is she herself who is hurt by the fickleness of "man" in this particular case.¹⁴ As the courtly tradition evolved, it became more and more common to present as the last stage of the development of a love affair the woman's abandonment and suffering at the hands of the man. The neglected and abandoned woman fills the last section of the Kokinshu love poems with her expressions of loneliness and unsatisfied yearnings, her feelings of uselessness, and her desires to disappear or die. The poem of Komachi is one of these poems, but in its tone of reflection it foreshadows the final statement of the love books on the nature of the world of love:

Like the Yoshino River which flows
Between Man and Woman peaks
Are the tears that flow
Between man and woman—
Such is the world of love.
Kokinshu 828

The compilers of the Kokinshu felt it their duty to make a final generalized pronouncement on the experience of love as their society saw it: the development of love follows a pattern of growth and decline, like nature, with the difference that man's own nature provides the desire to cling to the perfect moment that eventually causes the death of love. Suffering is thus the natural result of relations between man and woman.

The Izumi Shikibu Diary as a Celebration of Courtly Ritual and Courtly Attitudes toward Love

The pattern of development that the compilers of a poetic anthology such as the Kokinshu projected onto a love affair shows an obvious attempt at stylization of experience. Those in charge of passing on the traditions of courtly sentiment selected poems of the past and the present, poems by known and unknown poets, which reflected what they considered to be the correct expressions of emotions at various stages of a love affair and arranged them in an order characterized by growth, flourishing, and decline. Like the idealized affair depicted in the Kokinshu love poems, the development of the Diary's love affair can be seen as a series of distinct stages which form a pattern similar to that inthe Kokinshu.¹⁵ The Diary begins some time after the tenth day of the fourth month, when the Prince, the brother of Izumi Shikibu's former lover, sends her a message. It arrives just at a moment when the poetess is looking out at her garden, immersed in sad thoughts of the deceased prince who had been her lover. The Prince's message kindles a small flame of interest in her, nevertheless, and an exchange of poems is initiated which culminates, several days later, in the Prince's first nocturnal visit to the poetess. This stage of the love affair, which is comparable thematically to the Kokinshu stage of "love before the first meeting," takes three and one half pages in a recent Japanese edition.¹⁶ The next stage then begins, a stage which I will call "developing but untrusting love." Here the physical attraction that the lovers had felt for one another initially has been satisfied, yet shyness and fear prevent deeper intimacy between them. The pace of this stage is rapid and anxious. Meetings are accidentally or deliberately missed, a fact which does not fail to cause suspicion and mistrust to linger on both sides. This stage of the love affair goes a little into the fifth month, and lasts three and one half pages.

After this frenetic and hurried stage of mistrust, there occurs a relatively static stage whose beginning is signalled by the narrator's remark that "several days passed as the rain poured down listlessly."¹⁷ During this time the lovers communicate with one another only through written exchanges of poetry. Only one date is mentioned—the fifth of the fifth month. The leisurely expanse of time, unbroken by any "action," allows the lovers to achieve a gradual rapprochement. At the end of this period the Prince is moved to visit the poetess, but is given a lecture on the advisability of avoiding amorous entanglements by his former wet nurse, and decides not to go. It is evident from the fact that he allows himself to be held back by rumors and admonitions that the Prince still does not trust the poetess completely. After this stage, which takes two and one half pages but during which at least a few days elapse, comes a very long stage which I will call the stage of "gradual development of love and trust." This stage, lasting twenty-one pages and covering a period from some time in the sixth month to at least the tenth day of the tenth month, is the heart of the work. There occur several important meetings of the lovers, in each of which the Prince learns to know more of the depths of the poetess's heart and to cherish her fragility and vulnerability. The moon occurs in all of these scenes, and it is under its auspices that the immortal and dream-like qualities of the lovers' attachment to one another are revealed.

In the first part of this stage of the Diary the Prince's distrust of the poetess casts a shadow over the development of their love. It is, in fact, partly to avoid encountering other supposed suitors of the poetess that the Prince decides to take her to a deserted wing of his own mansion, instead of visiting her at her house. The lovers enjoy gazing at the moon together twice at this location. Soon after, the Prince visits the poetess one night, but no one hears his knock. Then he notices that there is another carriage standing next to the house but, significantly, he is now no longer considering breaking off contact with the poetess so he merely sends her a message expressing his chagrin. The poetess is sorely distressed by the Prince's continued suspicion of her, and writes reproaching him for his fickleness. A bit later, hearing from him that his feelings toward her continue to be very ambivalent, she confesses her fear that their feeling for one another will degenerate into bitterness and resentment. After a time during which they seem to grow even more distant from one another, the poetess suddenly invites the Prince one night to enjoy a particularly beautiful autumn moon with her. Though he does not spend the night with her, each of them gives in a little to the other: the narrator notes that the Prince is impressed by her childlike qualities and the poetess resolves to prove herfaithfulness to the Prince. But then vicious rumors once more keep the Prince from visiting her for some time. When the poetess hears about these rumors, she is about to give up in despair but is temporarily mollified when the Prince, remembering the Tanabata Festival on the seventh day of the seventh month, writes her a beautiful poem in honor of this festival of lovers. When the Prince receives an artfully written poem from her in response to his own, he feels once more that he cannot give her up, yet he pays her only one short visit during a long period, and that in daylight.

An interlude now occurs—the poetess, bored and anxious from waiting for visits from the Prince that do not materialize, goes on a pilgrimage outside the city. The Prince initiates a long poetic exchange with her there but does not make any effort to visit her. After the poetess has returned to the capital, and toward the end of the eighth month, the Prince sends her a poem on the theme of autumn. Delighted by his keen sensitivity to the season, the poetess quite forgives him for his neglect. Several weeks later, on a night past the twentieth day of the ninth month, the Prince, moved by the autumn moon, attempts to pay a visit to the poetess, but no one answers his knocking and he returns home in dejection. The poetess meanwhile, her deepest feelings aroused by the autumnal atmosphere, is unable to sleep. Stirred by the sight of the morning moon, she writes a long composition in which she expresses her melancholy feelings in a very poetic prose, and sends it off to the Prince. He appreciates her subtlety of feeling, and writes several poems in return, but does not visit her. They exchange poems back and forth for a time. Then, suddenly on the tenth of the tenth month, the Prince visits the poetess. It is a night made to touch the hearts of the lovers. The Prince is deeply moved by the poetess's sadness and reverie; he wonders at her strange silence, and is at last convinced of her innocence and vulnerability. From this night on his visits to the poetess are frequent, for he had been deeply touched by the poetess's charm that night, and now wants to look after her permanently. He asks the poetess to come and live with him at his palace. This invitation, flattering to the poetess though it is, also arouses doubts and fears in her mind, which she leaves unresolved for the moment. But the Prince, totally captivated by the poetess's charm and poetic sensibility, makes an internal vow to convince her to come to the palace permanently. By the end of this long stage the relationship between the lovers has subtly changed; the new level of intimacy and understanding is reflected in the Prince's referring to the poetess as his shinobi no tsuma (secret wife).

The long autumn rains provide a background for the next stage, which is made up almost completely of poetry exchanges. During this period of time, which runs from some time in the tenth month to midway through the twelfth month, the poetess attempts to decide whether to move into the palace. Each visit of the Prince increases her desire to go to live with him, so that despite her fears she inwardly decides to go. After a beautiful exchange of poems in which the lovers express the immortal qualities of their love, the Prince suddenly comes to take her to the palace. It is now the eighteenth day of the twelfth month. The stage of indecision had lasted thirteen and one half pages, but the last stage, after the poetess has been brought to the Prince's palace, lasts an indefinite time. In the text it occupies only four and one half pages.¹⁸ This stage could properly be called the stage of familiarity or completion—a state of continuous, regularized relationship for which the word "marriage" is usually used, except that the poetess's relationship to the Prince at this point is more technically that of a concubine. The drama and tension of courtship are over. The final desire arising out of the lovers' attachment to one another—that of being together permanently—has been fulfilled. Now a state of prosaic familiarity replaces the former one of mutual shyness and tension. After the poetess moves to the palace, there are no more poetry exchanges—prose dominates the narrative. And the prose treats not the fluctuations of a dreamlike courtship but the very real reactions of the courtiers to the poetess's arrival, her mixed feelings at being in new surroundings, and finally, the Prince's consort's angry plans to leave the palace. The manuscript breaks off untidily at this point.

Comparing the development of the poetess and the Prince's love affair with the stylized affair in the Kokinshu love books, it is obvious that the pattern of the love affair does not exactly reflect that of the Kokinshu. Its pattern deviates in an important way from the anthology pattern, particularly at the end, and I will discuss this deviation and its implications in the last part of this essay. There is no doubt, however, that the author of the Diary saw the real-life affair she was depicting in terms of stylized stages and moments of experience. The "action" of the narrative in the Diary can be broken down into the stylized Kokinshu topics of love before the first meeting, developing love (in which both happiness and suffering occur in greater measure than in the first stage), and love at its height (love as dream). Furthermore, included in the various sections of the Diary, though not necessarily in the same order in which they occurred in the Kokinshu love books, are poems on the more specific topics of yearning for the loved one before the first meeting, complaining of neglect by the loved one, parting after a night of love, begging the loved one to visit, experiencing the dreamlike, eternal quality of love, and fearing the reactions of the world to the love affair. These topics, with the exception of the first, occur over and over again quite naturally in the course of the narrative, demonstrating the almost unlimited variations which can be made on familiar Heian poetic topics. There are also numerous poems in the Diary in which the lovers demonstrate their sensitivity to natural phenomena or their witty perception of an event or situation—these too are stock attitudes or poses of the poetic tradition.

In her repeated use of anthology topics on the subject of love, the author demonstrates her allegiance to accepted attitudes and assumptions of her culture. At times, in fact, the poetess and the Prince seem to become stock anthology figures who mouth traditional sentiments and quote phrases of traditional poems in an aesthetic vacuum. Another way in which the author fulfills the aesthetic demands of her culture is her adherence to a view of social and aesthetic existence which places poetry as an everyday practice in the foreground of life, and makes of aesthetic ability almost a moral virtue. In the Diary, poetry—particularly the exchange of poems in a social context—tends to become the "action" of the work, and "character" is almost made equivalent to poetic sensibility. Poetry impinges on the structure of the Diary as well. For example, there are 144½ poems in the Diary, which covers 46½ pages in the original Japanese. Though the Diary purports to be a fictional narrative whose plot is organized around the development of a love affair of two particular people, the many poems in the Diary exert a crucial influence on the work. The poems occur often in groups which I will label sections of poetic exchanges; these groups of poems have a narrative function which is quite different from that of the plot, but which is equally essential to the work.

Poetry affected all fictional forms of the Heian period, probably because poetry as a form and ritual and the poetic vision of life embodied the highest cultural values of the age. In the various fictional forms—the nikki (diary), the uta-monogatari (poem-tale), and the monogatari (tale)—events follow one another dramatically in time, but there are periodic stops in the narrative during which a moment of emotion is expanded poetically (usually though not always in a poem), and the reader savors the emotion evoked rather than seeking to place the moment in a dramatic sequence of events. There is a "sudden glowing of poetic experience," as Earl Miner puts it—a lyrical moment in the midst of theflow of narration.¹⁹ In the uta-monogatari, an extreme form of poetry-prose, the poems are the focus, the prose serving merely an explanatory function. Here narrative is subsumed into lyricism. In the monogatari such as Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) the narrative is clearly the focus; the poems are integrated into the text as a social ritual or as a means of analyzing emotion. In such a work the poems, as well as the lyrical descriptions which, like poems, slow down the narrative and expand emotion, perform a more decorative and less dramatically necessary function. Similarly, in the Izumi Shikibu Diary passages of poetic exchange occur in between narrative passages. Their function is to slow down the process of the narrative by means of a gracious and elegant display of poetic sensibility. What is unique about the Diary as a work of Heian fiction is that in it poetic moments occur in almost equal proportion to narrated events.

The sections of poetic exchange in the Diary, then, tend to stop temporarily the flow of events that are being narrated, thus stopping time and invoking a mood of reflection or celebration. They are slow or even static, so that the modern reader accustomed to a tightly structured plot easily loses the thread of the action and, at times, becomes bored by the lack of tension. For here poetry dominates—the poetic exchange as a competitive social ritual fills up the important space, and the telling of the story is reduced to the minimal indications of narrative: "he said" or "she replied." An example of a section of poetic exchanges is found near the middle of the Diary, when the poetess, tired of waiting for the Prince to visit her, goes on a pilgrimage to a temple outside the city.²⁰ The isolation and quiet of the temple symbolize the lack of conflict and drama of this section. Throughout the whole section there is no visit from the Prince, but the poetess and the Prince do exchange poems on the poetic topic of lovers meeting. These poems permit the lovers, who are at the moment estranged, to express their resentment toward one another through the softened medium of ritual. The poems express the following action: to start out the Prince reproaches the poetess for having gone off on a pilgrimage, thus hindering a meeting between them. She in turn reproaches him for his long neglect. He then asks her to come back to the city, but she replies that he will have to tempt her if he wishes her to come after all the suffering he has put her through. Before the Prince has a chance to try this, however, she unexpectedly returns to the capital, and writes him a letter to the effect that she had returned because she still wanted to see him. A bit later, on a stormy day, the Prince writes her a poem which displays his usual sensitivity to the seasons, and she is moved to forgive him for his neglect.

That is the gist of the "action" in this section of the work. According to the demands of a narrative, this section should have formed one link in the chain of events which is the plot. Yet in spite of all the writing of poetry back and forth (which is in itself a kind of action, though ritualized action), no visit has occurred by the end of the section. It is true to say, however, that a mild and temporary harmony between the two lovers has been achieved. But in spite of the harmony achieved or the resolution won, the aim of this section seems to have been not so much the depiction of a crucial moment in the battle of wills which characterizes a courtship between two talented and proud people but the entertaining of the reader. The author demonstrates that the lovers are aware of courtly ideology—the body of courtly ideals and sentiments found in court poetry—by recording their poems which are subtle in wit and rich in allusions. The scene whose "action" I retold a moment ago is thus not really a scene, in the dramatic sense, but one timeless moment in the stylized, eternal drama of Heian courtship. The situation is a dialog of two estranged lovers. Their poems which, among other things, pun on the word meeting, using the familiar poetic place-names Osaka (ausaka—meeting-hill) and Omiji (aumichi—the road to a meeting) lend this section of the work a flavor of courtliness that is meant primarily to be enjoyed.²¹

When reading the Izumi Shikibu Diary, one often has the feeling that the author places her lovers in situations where they will have the opportunity to exchange poems on a traditional subject. Courtship itself is an ideal ritual for her purposes, as it affords countless opportunities for the expression of feeling in poetry. Furthermore, there is the excitement of the buildup of feeling on both sides. Besides the situation I discussed above, there are several others in the Diary which consist almost exclusively of poetic exchanges, with minimal prose narration and dramatic action. The section at the beginning where the lovers are gradually coming to know one another is one of these. Another is a section in which the poetess and the Prince exchange poems on the subject of tamakura no sode (the sleeve that serves as a pillow). The section near the end in which the poetess and the Prince exchange poems in ritualized fashion on the autumn leaves is also one of this sort.²² Possibly the author devotes so much attention to the static, aesthetic displays of poetic sensibility because she sees her material in terms of two traditional forms whose function was to portray the ideal courtly existence through the capturing of aesthetic moments of experience: the uta-monogatari and the poetic anthology. It is in the sections of poetic exchanges, where narrative is clearly subordinated to poetry, that the Diary is most similar to these two forms. It is in these sections, too, that the poetess and the Prince most give the impression of being an ideal courtly couple, in the manner of the various exemplary couples in the courtly love manual Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise, mid-tenth century). The sections dominated by poetic exchanges rather than narration give an impression of life as seen in terms of traditionally defined events, attitudes, and rituals. By means of her extensive use of the ritual of the poetic exchange as action, the author succeeds in recreating the timeless world of Heian court life in literary terms; the preponderance of ritualized action in the Diary in turn forces a poetic structure on it, one in which aesthetic moments of experience, not dramatic action, form the pattern of life.

Realism in the Izumi Shikibu Diary

In the preceding two parts of this essay I have concentrated on showing how the author of the Izumi Shikibu Diary's depiction of the love affair of the poetess and the Prince was influenced by the poetic tradition of the Heian court: its ideals of love, its exaltation of poetic sensibility over life, and its love of spectacle and aesthetic experience rather than dramatic action. Yet it is known that the author of the Diary was depicting the love affair of two particular people. Thus, as she wrote the Diary, the author must have had two views of a love affair in mind: first, the poetic pattern of the development of a love affair as found in traditional sources such as the poetic anthology; second, a pattern which was unique to the lovers before her, and which consisted of events that had really happened. One could say that the tendency to present what was expected and what was typical conflicted with the tendency to observe and report on actual human experience. What is happening in the Diary can be clarified by discussing for a moment a comparable fictional work in the romance mode from the Western Middle Ages, in which courtly love ideology plays an important role: Chretien de Troyes' Cligés (ca. 1170). Here the author delineates the development of love in two different pairs of lovers—Alixandres and Soredamors and Cligés and Fenice—in terms of the Ovidian tradition of viewing love. The presence of set stages of love, following one after the other in all the characters (with minor variations), has the effect of making the love affairs typical, notrealistic. Further, Chrétien's treatment of the second pair of lovers, Cligés and Fenice, in terms of his conscious reaction against the lovers Tristan and Yseult, reveals his strong interest in literary imitation rather than observation of real life.²³ No scrutiny of real people went into his depiction of the lovers—the delineation of the stages of love was a spectacle designed to decorate and adorn a text otherwise dominated by adventures and complex action, to delight and instruct the courtly reader through the presentation of a typical and familiar development of love.

If we imagine for a moment that Chrétien's characterization of his lovers was influenced by autobiographical data or actual observation of real people, we can better understand the position of the author of the Izumi Shikibu Diary in regard to her material. Both authors had the desire to be faithful to a certain accepted body of assumptions about the development of love—what I have referred to as the courtly ideology of love—but only in the author of the Izumi Shikibu Diary is there an equally strong desire to tell a story which happened to real people, one of whom was most likely herself. We can say that the author of the Diary attempted to write a poetic narrative which was at the same time based on her personal observation of the lives of the people in the Diary. Thus, she operated under a demand for realism which was virtually unknown in medieval Western romance. Whether her depiction of the affair of the poetess and the Prince is realistic in the sense of being faithful to the facts of the affair of Izumi Shikibu and Prince Atsumichi we have no way of proving, due to the lack of historical records, and indeed, this is a question of interest primarily to biographers of Izumi Shikibu. The portrait of the poetess that emerges from the Diary tallies with what little is known of her character and personality, and with her reputation as a fascinating woman. But a more interesting literary question one could pose in reference to the realism of the Diary is whether or not the Diary, when considered as it ought to be—as a work of fiction—reveals what one could call character or individual will.

The depiction of the interaction of the human will with external events is an important aspect of realism as we know it. The poetic anthology, as an artistically manipulated depiction of typical stages of love, reveals only an artificial dramatic tension between lovers at various stages of a love affair. In the Diary, by contrast, dramatic tension arises naturally from the response of the two individuals to one another and to the love that slowly grows between them, and this tension quite naturally forms the plot of the work. For example, two topics found in the Kokinshu books—fear of others' reactions to one's love and anxiety over whether or not to reveal one's love—are dramatized in the Diary, lending vitality and dynamism to the work.²⁴ Soon after his first visit to the poetess, the Prince begins to express his fears that his visits will be found out. On the one hand the Prince fears the practical consequences of his wife's discovery of his affair, for she is the daughter of a powerful and influential official. On the other, he fears that he will become, like his deceased brother who had also had an affair with the poetess, the butt of malicious gossip directed at the poetess. Finally, he fears that the gossip about the poetess's looseness is true, and that by visiting her he will expose himself to the possibility of rejection by her in favor of someone else. Here personal pride rather than fear of other people is involved. The poetess, on her part, holds back from involvement with the Prince out of fear that, if the affair is found out, she will be subjected to malicious gossip at the hands of courtiers who are even more ruthless toward women than they are towards men. Further, she fears that the Prince will be unable to withstand the continual attacks made on her by others, and will abandon her. In such passages the author, by analyzing the complexity of her characters' fears, makes what was a set topic in the poetic anthology into dramatic action, what was stylized feeling into an expression of character or will.

The poetess and the Prince are depicted as both psychological and social beings. Fear of becoming involved with the loved one results from pride and vanity, as well as from a feeling of awe toward a superior woman, on the part of the Prince; from passivity and intense self-love on the part of the poetess. The interaction of two such people is in itself a drama, a quiet battle of wills which has an ending growing out of the characters of the two. In the Diary, the social world is crucial to the development of the plot. Much as the reader might think that the author is creating a world in which only the lovers exist, society necessarily breaks into the dream world. The Prince and the poetess internalize the moralistic attitude of their society in their fears of malicious gossip. Their fear causes them to delay becoming involved with one another, and this delaying holds up the movement of the plot. Sometimes other people actually intervene in the action, as when the Prince's former wet nurse Jiju reveals, to his face, her disapproval of his attentions to the poetess and when the Prince's consort expresses, also to his face, her hurt and anger at his bringing the poetess to the palace. These interventions too are part of the plot.²⁵ All in all, the lovers' shyness of one another, coupled with their need to be aware of the reactions of others, creates a sinuous pattern of approaching, then backing away again, which makes their courtship literarily dramatic. After the stage of the height of love is reached, the lovers' indecision about whether to make a further commitment to one another, expressed in internal self-questioning and external arguments and discussions, creates another source of emotional tension which moves the plot forward.

The Izumi Shikibu Diary was written in a period in Japanese literature when realism often meant the close awareness of one's aesthetic environment and the close attention to the fluctuations of one's experience in time. Autobiography, or the application of realism as I have defined it to a lengthy portrayal of oneself, was strongly developed in the culture in such forms as the nikki (diary) and the zuihitsu (random notes). The Izumi Shikibu Diary, usually labeled a nikki though it is actually a fictionalized memoir,²⁶ shares the subjective characteristics of diary literature—it communicates vividly the flow of experience of its heroine. In reading the Diary one realizes that it is the poetess whose particular aura lingers over the pages, whether it is the poetess as a culture heroine of the Heian period or as the fascinating heroine of a love drama. So much trouble is taken to depict the poetess as ultimately fascinating and sensitive that one is moved to consider whether the author, if she is indeed Izumi Shikibu herself, was in some measure using the Diary as a means of immortalizing, or even defending herself.²⁷ We must remember that in Heian times, languorous sensitivity was a virtue, and the poetess—if we are to believe the Diary—surely exceeds all other mortals in this quality. A certain definable poeticized image of the poetess emerges gradually in the course of the courtship. This image, seen in continuous dramatic conflict with the Prince, takes on the contours of a realistic character.

The character of the poetess is revealed not in her poetry, which tends to emphasize her role as a poetess rather than her individual qualities, but in her thoughts. These are reported sympathetically, and from a very close proximity, by the narrator of the Diary. In one scene, the morning after her first night spent with the Prince, the poetess is thinking over the events of the previous night, deciding whether to write to the Prince and, if so, what she should say. The narrator notes that

… as she wrote, the poetess's mind was full of conflicting emotions: How amazed she wasat her present behavior, after all the late Prince had done for her. While she was thinking such thoughts the usual messenger from the Prince came in. Had he brought a letter? she wondered. No, he hadn't. The poetess began to feel dejected, and at this she realized how deeply involved her feelings were.²⁸

Here the author focuses first on the poetess's feelings of guilt at her quick change of loyalty to the late Prince's brother, when the late Prince had after all not been dead even a year. The narrator skirts the ambiguity of the poetess's moral situation, emphasizing rather her ability to feel intensely and with complexity. Where confusion of the feelings caused by love (omoimidareru) was seen in Kokinshu No. 501, for example, as immoral from a religious standpoint, here, in the refuge of subjectivity which is autobiographical fiction, to have conflicting emotions caused by love is evidence of a sensitive—and therefore of an interesting, admirable, and almost good—character.

The poetess's character—her vulnerability coupled with strength, her capacity to feel deeply with things—is revealed to the reader, and to the Prince, in a series of scenes which culminate in the meeting on the night of the tenth of the tenth month. In all of these scenes the moon is significantly present. A comparison of the use of the moon image in the Kokinshu love books with that in the Diary will provide an example of the way in which the author of the Diary refashioned a traditional image to make it express the particular qualities of her heroine, and of the love affair as a whole. The moon was not an important image in the Kokinshu love poems. In fact, Book XIII, which in its overall theme of the height of love is the natural equivalent of the scenes in question from the Diary, contains only three poems using the image of the moon. In one of them, No. 648, a lover comments happily that the presence of the moonlight allows him to see his loved one clearly. This use of the moon as an image which accompanies a happy meeting of two lovers is generally reflected in the Diary, for example, in the numerous scenes where the Prince and the poetess gaze at the moon together. But the author of the Diary uses the image of the moon so often and so deliberately in this section of the work that one feels she must see the moon as linked in some special way with the sensibility and character of the lovers. Indeed, the fact that the appearance of the moon on a particular night often moves the lovers to long for one another, to write to one another, and to make attempts to see one another, is evidence that the sight of the moon in some way reminds them of one another on a level of feeling which is both unconscious and spontaneous. Then, too, the appearance of the moon is the stimulus for the writing of poems, and it is correct to say that the scenes in the moonlight elicit the poems which communicate, more than others in the work, the dreamlike atmosphere of Heian courtly love.

In another Kokinshu poem, No. 625, a lover laments the appearance of the morning moon (ariake no tsuki) because he knows it means he will have to part from his beloved. Thus, this poem on the morning moon is one of the numerous poenis in Book XIII on the theme of the sad parting of lovers at dawn. In the Diary the image of the morning moon is used only once in the context of a parting or separation, and that is when the Prince, who has returned home on a moonlit night after trying in vain to visit the poetess, writes her a poem in which he expresses his regret that he was unable to watch the setting of the morning moon with her. Though the Prince uses the image of the morning moon while separated from the poetess, it is worth emphasizing that for the Prince, watching the setting of the morning moon with the poetess would of itself have been pleasurable, and not the signal for a sad parting as in the Kokinshu. But the image of the morning moon in the Diary is usedmost often as a symbol of a kind of unearthly beauty that the lovers, due to the intensity and similarity of their sensibilities, can experience together. Rather than indicating an impending separation, as in the Kokinshu, the image of the morning moon is used in the Diary to emphasize the lovers' unity with one another through their deep poetic sensibility, and the enduring nature of their love. The third use of the moon image in the Kokinshu is that in poem No. 633, where a lover going forth to visit his beloved compares himself to the moon rising from behind a mountain. Interestingly, the author of the Diary uses the moon image once in this way. At an early point in the stage of the height of love the poetess, moved by the autumn moon, had invited the Prince to visit her and when he came she recited a poem to him in which she expressed the hope that the moon passing by her dwelling would stop and shine inside it. Here, as in the Kokinshu poem, the moon is used as a metaphor for the Prince, who rambles through the world as the moon travels across the sky, and the poetess's fresh and appealing use of this image, as she invites him to stay, causes the Prince to notice her childlike honesty for the first time.²⁹

The author of the Diary gives the image of the moon a much more important function than the compilers of the Kokinshu had given it. In the Diary the moon becomes a symbol for the whole stage of the height of love. The moon is the most frequent and the most intense image in the pages which delineate the highest points in the love affair between the poetess and the Prince, and its presence lends this stage of the Diary an atmosphere of wonder and perfection in love which is the equivalent of that provided by the image of dream in the Kokinshu love books. Finally, the moon is revealed to be a symbol for the poetess herself. In the Diary the moon becomes a more comprehensive literary symbol than was possible in the short, discontinuous poetic form of the tanka. As is proper to an extended narrative mode, the image of the moon in the Diary functions as a leitmotif—whenever the moon is announced, and this occurs usually at the beginning of a scene, the reader anticipates a scene in which the love affair between the poetess and the Prince will reach a new height of intensity, or a scene in which the nature of their relationship will become more clear. The moon presides over the first night the lovers spend together. Then, after a long period of neglect, the Prince takes the poetess one night to a deserted spot where, viewing the moon together, they deepen their intimacy.³⁰ Still later, after the Prince has stayed away from the poetess a long time, believing vicious rumors he has heard about her, she invites him to view the moon with her. She is in a charming mood and composes a poem which so convinces him of her sincerity and innocence that he quite forgets the rumors. Though he does not stay with her that night, he writes her a poem in which he asserts that though his outward form (kage) leaves her, his heart (kokoro) remains. In the next significant incident, which occurs early in the morning sometime past the twentieth of the ninth month, the moon is obscured.³¹ Here the Prince, aroused by the setting moon, had attempted to visit the poetess, but somehow the servants did not get to the gate in time, and he left in dejection. The poetess, unable to sleep due to the turmoil of her feelings, spends the whole night writing a long composition. This passage is the longest prose passage in the work. Since it is the place where the poetess's character is first revealed extensively, it is worth examining in detail.

In her composition the poetess traces, in the first person, the fluctuations of her feelings in response to the passing of time and to the transformation of the natural world around her. Though the composition is written in highly stylized poetic language and stresses the poetess's persona as a cultured representative of Heian sensibility and taste, an image of the uncultured and innocent poetess as a person shines through it. The poetess writes that the moon is obscured, and as the powerful autumn wind blows she is overcome by a feeling of melancholy which is particularly autumnal. She feels like the frail grasses buffeted helplessly by the wind, she writes, and lies listlessly for a long time, overcome by the changes occurring continuously in the natural phenomena around her. Suddenly the cry of a wild goose seems to give painful voice to her unspoken loneliness. Roused to the breaking point by her sadness, she pushes open the door to her verandah and at that moment catches sight of the moon which has now emerged from behind the clouds and is mysteriously visible through a light mist. It is now dawn; when the poetess hears the sudden crowing of a cock and the simultaneous ringing of a temple bell in the morning mist, she is moved to express her acute awareness of the moment in a poem.

What the poetess has described in her composition is the Heian aesthetic ritual of experiencing unity with nature, or experiencing mono no aware—the sadness of things. The final phrase of the poem she writes labels the experience as such:

There is nothing so sadly beautiful
As the waning moon at dawn.

The word aware (sadly beautiful) links the poetess to nature through her awareness of its transient beauty, and of her own ephemerality and fragility. As the poet Narihira was one with spring (haru no mono) in his poem on his reverie during the long spring rains, here the poetess is one with autumn. The poetess's poem is a standard expression of a kind of experiencing judged by Heian courtly ideology to be among the highest. Her prose, however, emphasizes not the act of experiencing but the person in the act of experiencing. Movement and mild drama enter the prose as the poetess describes sensation after sensation. As she writes, it becomes evident that her emotions and the still more unconscious physical level of her being are entangled with the natural transformations she describes, in a way that is impossible to express in the tight structure and circumscribed diction of court poetry. Thus, the poetess does not merely observe or sense the grass buffeted by the autumn wind—she is the grass. She is the moon which is obscured. Her personal physical tension builds up as the tension and movement increase in the nature around her. A concatenation of natural events acting on her senses—the sudden appearance of the moon, the ringing of the temple bell, and the crowing of a cock—push the poetess's tension to a point where it overflows in tears. Then, her physical self once more quiet, she is like the moon which, earlier obscured by mist, now has freed itself at last.³²

In this passage the moon is seen as a natural phenomenon. But it is also seen as possessing the qualities of purity and transcendence, as it throws off the clouds obscuring it—qualities the Prince later associates with the poetess. The poetess's depth of feeling and her childlike innocence are revealed, gradually and mysteriously, at night, and only at choice moments such as the one I just described, just as the moon is often obscured and appears brightly only on certain nights. On this occasion the poetess's radiance appears to the reader and to the Prince secondhand, through writing. Words, cultural and social barriers against revelation of the inner self, still intervene between the poetess and others, obscuring her true image. On another occasion, the night of the tenth of the tenth month, the Prince and the reader become aware of the character or rather the being of the poetess directly, as if it were a natural force moving suddenly and wordlessly.³³ The moon is once again obscured by clouds, and the poetess's feelings are tangled. She lies mute, overcome by aware. It isnot a personal sorrow she feels, yet the Prince senses forlornness in her attitude. Her very fragility and vulnerability, brought home to him by her inability to speak, arouse a pity and compassion in him which are mingled with sensual attraction. He is moved to touch her—the only mention of physical contact in the work. The scene obviously represents the height of their love. It was a night "deliberately created to move the heart deeply," says the narrator, and the poetess is once again immersed in a deep state of identification with nature. She is at first too distraught to reply to a poem that the Prince addresses to her, but in her poem to him the next morning she refers to their love as lasting the space of a dream (yume bakari).³⁴ The third book of the Kokinshu love poems had referred to love as a dream. Thus, when the poetess uses the metaphor of dream to describe the love between herself and the Prince, -she is taking her place in the courtly tradition as a lover immersed in the perfection of love.

The moon as a poetic image linked to the poetess occurs two more times in the Diary: once, after a long absence, the Prince sends the poetess a poem on the moon which she answers so beautifully that he vows to arrange to have her near him always. The final time that the moon appears as a literary symbol is on the night the Prince takes the poetess to his palace, the eighteenth of the twelfth month.³⁵ But the scene on the night of the tenth of the tenth month was the turning point of the work. The sections leading up to that one were designed to reveal gradually the poetess's unique character or being, and in order to do that the author evolved a personalized symbol for the poetess's particular mystery. Like the moon, the poetess is the very source of yin, the dark, feminine principle. Such a source of power is by nature hidden. The masculine, yang power of the Prince is needed to reveal it. It is at this point in the Diary that one feels the work was really written in order to present a sympathetic portrait of the poetess, and the Prince was inserted because only a man could reveal the poetess's deepest being. Whether or not that was the case, the author shows that becoming aware of the poetess's being is equivalent to loving it, so that once this night of the obscured, wordless moon is past, love suddenly exists between the poetess and the Prince. The mystery that was the poetess's being has been revealed.³⁶

It may seem strange to call the author's technique realism here, and that mysterious nature of the poetess's which is revealed, character. But as I said before, the qualities that the poetess possessed, and which her culture—particularly the poetic culture which is at the heart of this work—valued were not social or moral qualities but qualities relating to experiencing and perception: intensity, subtlety, depth: also, poetic sensibility; finally, unconsciousness or the ability to identify with nature.³⁷ These are qualities which are just as observable in people as other sorts of qualities, given the right circumstances. They are also just as liable to be found in unique combinations in people. The author of the Diary takes pains to present the poetess in situations where her unique qualities appear. Thus, sensitivity and complexity of feeling appear immediately, in the first stage of love. The ability to feel unity with nature, the quality of being unconscious, like nature, is seen in the composition the poetess writes. Finally, the qualities of supreme naturalness, mystery, innocence, and vulnerability—qualities symbolized by the moon—are revealed on the autumn night when the poetess gives up her fear of involvement, her attachment to writing, and completely abandons herself to the Prince. What the author is describing here is the quality of yin—a pure, egoless feminine power—which is nonetheless embodied in a particular person.…

Notes

¹ Northrop Frye uses the term romance to describe a narrative mode or genre which is closely related to either a seasonal or a class ritual, such as the tournament; which presents "characters in vacuo idealized by revery"; and in which "verse or characteristics of verse" are prominent. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 107, 305, 324. The Izumi Shikibu Diary is a romance in that it is closely related to the ritual of the passing seasons and to the class rituals of courtship and poetry composing; furthermore, poetry plays an important and even dominant role in it, and its characters are certainly "idealized by revery." When I later refer to a "poetic view of life" I mean a view of life influenced by romance's preference for ideal types as well as its didacticism.

² In the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary, the poetess herself is generally considered to be the author. Consequently I refer to the author as "she." For a detailed discussion of the most recent inquiries into the authorship of the Diary, see Edwin A. Cranston, tr., and introd., The Izumi Shikibu Diary: A Romance of the Heian Court (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 44-90.

³ Eugéne Vinaver notes that Chrétien de Troyes' characters in a romance such as Cligés (ca. 1170) express their reactions to love in rhetorical monologs derived from Ovid's Metamorphoses and others of his works., The monologs revealed what was considered to be the ideal way to react to love in the culture; thus their function was rhetorical and didactic rather than psychologically realistic. Eugene Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 24-32.

⁴ Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner consider the "rhetoric of poetry in the first classical period" (the period of the first imperial anthologies of poetry) as the "true vehicle of its thought and its greatness"—a comment which suggests the importance of both the formal qualities of poetry and its view of life, for literature of whatever genre; in their Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 215.

⁵ My text of the Kokinwakashu is edited by Saeki Umetomo, Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol. 8 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1958). All translations of the Kokinshu poems, as well as of passages from the Diary, are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

⁶ Vinaver defines courtly ideology as the codes of behavior and assumptions that the medieval poet of the court such as Chrétien expresses and comments on in his works. I feel that the Kokinshu, and other later anthologies, are important repositories of medieval Japanese courtly ideology. See Vinaver, p. 32.

⁷ Konishi Jin'ichi divides the five books of love poems in the Kokinshu into the general topics of "love yet undeclared," "courtship," "love after the first meeting," "the lover's growing coolness," and "the ending of the affair in bitterness and misery." See his, "Association and Progression: Principles of Integration in Anthologies and Sequences of Japanese Court Poetry, A.D. 900-1350," tr. and adapted by Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, HJAS, 21 (1958), 100-101. My analysis, in contrast to Konishi's, emphasizes specific recurrent images and themes. Furthermore, I present a deliberately schematic picture of the development of love in the poetic anthology in order to encourage a comparison with the pattern of the development of love depicted in the Diary. In reality, themes and topics are not limited to the books with which I associate them. For example, poems on the topic ofdream (yume), which I link with Book XIII, appear also in Book XV, in Nos. 766, 767, and 768, and the image of sleeves wet with tears, which I associate also with Book XIII, is carried through in Book XIV, in Nos. 731 and 733, and in Book XV, Nos. 756, 757, and 763. The Kokinshu compilers' placing of poems on the same topic in different books served to emphasize the continuity of theme and experience between books; my analysis serves to emphasize the difference in theme from book to book.

⁸ Earl Miner sees yume as the most profound Japanese image for love in courtly literature. See Earl Miner, "Japanese and Western Images of Courtly Love," Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 15 (1966), 174-79.

⁹ For a discussion of the Heian conception of dreams see Kubota Utsubo, Kokinwakashu hyoshaku (Tokyo: Tokyodo, 1960), II, 254.

¹⁰ Chretien's character Alixandres, in a long monolog, questions the nature of his heart's malady. First he decides that his illness is so grave that there is no cure for it ("Je sant le mien mal si grevain/Que ja n'an avrai garison …"). Pursuing this thought further, he admits to himself that his illness is love. Then, knowing the power of love, he decides to let love do with him what it wants. Finally, he says he no longer wants to be cured of his illness, unless by the source of it—i.e., by Soredamors, his loved one. Thus, reason and self-analysis have ended by convincing Alixandres to accept with joy the "sickness" of love, and to hope for the satisfaction of desire which will be its cure. Les Romans de Chretien de Troyes: II, -Cligés, ed. Alexandre Micha (Paris: Champion, 1970), 11. 608-864. In comparison with the lovers in Cligés, the lover in the Heian poetic anthology does not attempt to rationalize his desire, but only condemns it.

¹¹ Poems containing the image of dream alternate with those containing the image of sleeves wet with tears. Nos. 552 and 553 (dream) are followed by Nos. 556 and 557 (sleeves wet with tears); then Nos. 558, 559, 569, 574, and 575 bring back the image of dream. Nos. 576, 577, 596, and 598 reassert the theme of sleeves wet with tears, but the final mood of Book XII is given by Nos. 608 and 609, which contain the image of dream. In one poem, No. 574, the two images are used together. There are several poems (Nos. 567, 572, 573, 581, 595, and 599) in which tears appear, and if one adds these to the poems using the image of sleeves wet with tears, poems with the word "tears" outnumber those using the word "dream."

¹² For my interpretation of this poem I am indebted to Kubota, II, 313.

¹³ See, for example, the commentary of Brower and Miner on this poem in Japanese Court Poetry, pp. 452-53.

¹⁴ For my interpretation of this poem I am indebted to Brower and Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, pp. 204-5.

¹⁵ Modern editors of the Izumi Shikibu nikki have divided the work in various ways. Suzuki Kazuo and Enji Fumiko in Zenko Izumi Shikibu nikki (Tokyo: Shibundo, 1965) have divided the work into twenty-three parts, each of which is a separate incident. Miyazaki Shohei in his Heianjoryu nikkibungaku no kenkyu in Kasama sosho, Vol. 33 (Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 1972), divides the work into forty-eight sections, also according to what he considers are independent sections of the plot. My idea is to divide the Diary into longer sections, sections which approximate the number and content of the stages of love in the Kokinshu, in order to stress the courtly pattern of love which underlies the work.

¹⁶ My text for the Izumi Shikibu nikki is that edited by Endo Yoshimoto, Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol. 20 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1962). The page numbers in the footnotes refer to this edition. I am also indebted to the edition of Suzuki Kazuo and Enji Fumiko and to the translation of Edwin A. Cranston, both mentioned above.

¹⁷ Endo, ed., Izumi Shikibu nikki, p. 405.

¹⁸ The six stages I have described are found on the following pages in the Endo edition of the Izumi Shikibu nikki: stage one—p. 399-402, 1. 8; stage two—p. 402, 1. 9 to p. 405, 1. 14; stage three—p. 405, 1. 15 to p. 408, 1. 8; stage four—p. 408,1. 9 to p. 428,1. 8; stage five—p. 428, 1. 9 to p. 441, 1. 16; stage six—p. 441, 1. 16 to p. 446, 1. 8.

¹⁹ Earl Miner, Japanese Poetic Diaries (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), p. 19.

²⁰Izumi Shikibu nikki, pp. 416-18.

²¹ The poems which refer to meetings occur on p. 417 of the Izumi Shikibu nikki. There are seven poems in all, and the way in which they are used—the Prince first swearing that he has missed the poetess and would very much like to see her, she then reproaching the Prince in two poems for his failure to visit her, he then, in turn, reproaching her for her coldness toward him, and she having the last word in two poems that express her deep misery—reflects a typical pattern of courtly exchange between a man and a woman in which each tries to outdo the other in wit and depth of feeling.

²² These passages are to be found, respectively, in the Izumi Shikibu nikki pp. 404, 1. 3 to p. 407, 1. 10; p. 423, 1. 3 to p. 426, 1. 8; p. 430, 1. 7 to p. 431, 1. 16.

²³ It is obvious that Chrétien was reacting to the theme of illicit love conveyed by the Tristan story in his time by having Fenice refuse to escape from her husband openly—instead, he has her feign death and, once believed dead, she can enjoy her love with Cligés. For Fenice's refusal to be like Yseult see Cligés, 11. 5199-5203 and 5249-56.

²⁴ Such passages, reported in indirect statement by the narrator, are found in abundance in the stage I have labeled "developing but untrusting love"—see, for example, Izumi Shikibu nikki, p. 403, 11. 4-6 and p. 405, 11. 6-7, 11. 12-14.

²⁵ The first episode is found in the Izumi Shikibu nikki on p. 407, 1. 10 to p. 408, 1. 8. The anger and frustration of the Prince's consort, culminating in her decision to return to the home of her sister, fill most of the last three and one half pages of the work.

²⁶ For a discussion of the fluidity of Heian narrative genres see Edwin Cranston's introduction to his translation, pp. 90-125.

²⁷ The image of the poetess that is depicted in the Diary is that of a fascinating woman. But the fascination she exerts on men, far from being the fascination exercised by a dangerous femme fatale who brings men to an early grave (and for which Izumi Shikibu was criticized in real life), is seen here in its benign aspect, as a childlike vulnerability to which the Prince is finally irresistibly attracted. In this sense the Diary softens the picture of Izumi Shikibu as a lascivious, scandalous woman, and accomplishes the feat of conveying an appealing image of the poetess to posterity.

²⁸Izumi Shikibu nikki, p. 402, 11. 13-15.

²⁹ The Prince's poem expressing regret that he will be unable to watch the setting of the morning moon with the poetess is found in the Izumi Shikibu nikki, p. 419. Two poems which emphasize the lovers' unity of sensibility, and the enduring nature of their love, are the poetess's poems which begin "Ware naranu/Hito mo sazo min …" (There is surely someone besides me who sees …), and "Yoso nite mo/Onaji kokoro ni/Ariake no/Tsuki o miru to ya …" (Is there someone who, even though in a different place, gazes at the morning moon with the same feelings as I do? …). These poems are found on pp. 420 and 421, respectively. The Prince shows his unity of sensibility with the poetess in his poem which repeats two of the phrases that Izumi had used, "Ware naranu," and "Onaji kokoro ni." His poem is found on p. 421. The poem in which the poetess refers to the Prince as the moon is found on p. 412.

³⁰ In the first episode, found on pp. 401-2, the narrator writes: "While they were talking of various matters, the moon rose. It was very bright." In the second episode, found on pp. 408-9, the narrator relates: "Because the moon was very bright, when he said 'Get down [from the carriage],' she got down with distaste." In her setting of the important meetings of her lovers on moonlit nights the author is probably following the example of Narihira's famous poem, which chooses a moonlit night to recall, and celebrate, the eternal quality of a love affair of the past. Moonlight, then, is the natural setting for an important scene of love.

³¹ These two incidents begin on p. 411, 1. 16 and p. 418, 1. 15, respectively, in the Izumi Shikibu nikki. In the first, the Prince discovers the poetess's childlike qualities for the first time. This discovery helps to allay the fears awakened in him by the continued gossip he hears about her. In the second, the lovers are brought together in spirit by the beautifully shining moon.

³² It is of course true that the poetess is not seen or presented as she experiences the feelings described in the prose piece—she wrote them down. Thus, they are distanced and even somewhat clicheed. Yet I would maintain that even in this piece written for diversion (tenarai no yo ni) some of the poetess's charm and depth of feeling comes through to the Prince. It is the longest and freest expression of the poetess's sensibility so far in the work. And the Prince is reported to have been pleased by what he had read, even if he hid his pleasure and answered the poetess's letter by reproaching her for not managing to hear his knock that night.

³³ This episode begins in the Izumi Shikibu nikki on p. 422.

³⁴Izumi Shikibu nikki, p. 423.

³⁵ These episodes begin on p. 427,1. 14 and 441, 1. 16, respectively.

³⁶ The Prince sees the poetess in a new light after the scene on the tenth of the tenth month. He had come to visit her that night with a few remnants of his earlier suspicion of her, but after seeing her attitude of complete vulnerability, he is completely won over. The Prince had formerly stood in awe of the poetess as a superior woman; furthermore, he had seen in her a person who was able to hurt him by giving her attentions to other men. Now that he sees that she is able to be subjugated by the force of nature, and by his love for her, he is no longer in awe of her but treats her more affectionately as someone to be protected by him. In terms of power, they are equal, since the poetess has finally revealed the truth behind what he had earlier perceived as her faithlessness. From this point forward the Prince will no longer be attempting to penetrate the poetess's mystery but rather to manipulate her into coming to live at his palace, where she will be more than ever before under his power. What this means for the plot is that the Prince's problem of solving the riddle of the poetess's power, which was the motivating force of the first part of the Diary, now yields to the more concretely logistical problem of how to manipulate the poetess into becoming completely dependent on him. In an atmosphere increasingly dominated by power manipulations, it is logical that the author becomes more and more preoccupied with the depiction of the wills of her characters, especially Izumi. See the fourth part of this article (from p. 174) for a discussion of this phenomenon.

³⁷ Such qualities were of course assigned value in Heian culture, just as more obviously moral qualities such as loyalty or humility are assigned value in other cultures. For instance, the poetess's ability to feel deeply and intensely is indirectly praised by the author, in that she shows the Prince's deepest feelings—feelings which later express themselves in an ethical commitment to the poetess—being aroused by it. The poetess's depth of feeling, in the context of the moonlit night, seems to move the Prince also to an awareness of the tender sadness of life which goes well beyond his feelings of compassion for the poetess's personal sadness. In her ability to live the Heian ideal of sensitivity to the sadness of things, the poetess is demonstrating the passion that was the basis of her reputation, and this passion the author reveals as deeply moral in its implications, if not always in its immediate manifestations.…